Hospital Chief To Keep Job Single Vote Allows Welch To Stay On As Administrator

August 17, 1988|By Rick Tonyan of The Sentinel Staff

DELAND — After a West Volusia Memorial Hospital Authority commissioner accused him of attempting to alter a financial report and of keeping information from the authority, hospital administrator Larry Welch on Tuesday survived by one vote an attempt to fire him.

Commissioner Bernice Fishpaw, who made the accusation, and Commissioner Bill Pate voted to remove Welch from the $75,000-per-year job he has held since 1977.

Commission Chairman Dick Heard and commissioners Alice Jones and Richard Hagstrom out-voted Fishpaw and Pate. The vote angered a group of Welch's critics who attended the Tuesday authority meeting at the hospital.

Welch sat quietly as Fishpaw read a statement and as the vote was taken. After the vote, he denied Fishpaw's charges.

Hiram Wright, a retired administrator of Fish Memorial Hospital, DeLand, was one of the audience who was upset about the vote. Wright has been a foe of Welch since 1984, when West Volusia sued to stop the sale of rival Fish to a group of nine physicians.

The rivalry ended in January, when the physicians sold Fish to West Volusia. Questions over the operations of the joint hospitals led to the movement to fire Welch.

Fishpaw, reading from a written statement, leveled two charges at Welch -- that he tried to alter a financial report last month in an attempt to downplay losses at the hospitals and that he never let the authority know a private, non-profit foundation has been managing two satellite clinics since the Fish sale.

''The events of the past few weeks are just the latest strands in the tangled web of deception that has been woven around this board for many years,'' Fishpaw read before making a motion to fire Welch.

Pate, a DeLand physician, said he did not agree with Fishpaw's charges, but he joined in the firing attempt because he believes Welch may not be able to manage the hospital as it deals with west Volusia's booming population growth. Welch said he did not try to alter last month's financial report, which showed the flow of revenue in and out of the two hospitals during June. All he did was ask the hospitals' comptroller, John Allen, about how he reports losses such as bad debts, Welch said.

Allen brought up at an authority meeting last month that Welch had questioned the amount of losses reported.

Critics of the administrator accused Welch of wanting the report altered to show the hospitals in a better financial light as election campaigns gear up for the authority.

Fishpaw said she learned of the existence of West Volusia Health Care Inc., a private, non-profit foundation that works under the umbrella of the hospital, on Monday. Then, she discovered that the group, with Jones as president, has been managing the hospitals' two clinics in Deltona and DeLeon Springs.

Pate said he has known of the foundation since May; Heard said he was aware of it since its beginning. Hagstrom could not be reached for comment after the meeting.

Welch said West Volusia Health Care, which the hospital formed in 1984 but never used, took control of the clinics when the deal for Fish closed. Fish operations were transferred to the West Volusia Medical Foundation, another non-profit corporation under the hospital's umbrella. Before the Fish sale, the foundation had managed the clinics.

Because Fish had a mortgage on it and Florida law forbids governmental agencies from assuming mortgages, the authority could not buy the hospital. To get around that, commissioners had the foundation buy Fish and then appointed themselves directors of the group. Welch said West Volusia Health Care then took control of the clinics.